Vroom: Three guys, one muscle car, and a Tallahassee reunion 55 years in the making

Jeff Leckinger never thought he would see his first ever car again, let alone 55 years to the day he bought it back on April 1, 1969.

Leckinger's 1969 Oldsmobile F-85 Cutlass W-31 has been passed off to several different owners and locations until it ended up in New York with Steve Puleo.

After years of restoration and planning, Steve and his brother Joe managed to get all the previous owners of the Cutlass together to celebrate 55 years of its life and the joy and memories it brought to each and every person who got to drive it.

"I'm planning a party with people I've never met in a place I've never been," Steve Puleo said.

His party was hosted on Monday at the location of the former Courtesy Oldsmobile, on the corner of South Monroe and Jennings streets. He managed to get in contact with the current owner of the building, Mike Wester, who let them keep the car overnight before the big surprise in the morning.

Steve, 55, Leckinger, 73, and Richard Mabie, 70, the third owner, along with his brother Ken, all managed to get together to swap stories of owning the car, taking it out racing, and they even got to cruise around in it for old time's sake.

Oh, the places a car will go

Leckinger's story with the car is a short-lived one.

While attending high school, he purchased a brand new 1969 Oldsmobile F-85 with the help of his father from Courtesy Oldsmobile for $3335.22, which today would be the amount of a down payment on a new car.

The car came painted gold with black rally stripes, featuring a black interior with a bench seat and SSII Rally wheels.

After only a year of owning the car, Leckinger traded in the Cutlass sometime in 1970 to All American Ford in Tallahassee. He opted for a Ford van, which better fit his life of traveling, taking it with him on road trips and surfing jaunts.

"The brake job was $450," Leckinger said. "Expensive car. That's why I had to get rid of it."

The next owner was Lou Childers, who bought it in 1970 after serving three tours in Vietnam. He was the first of the owners to truly change up the car, swapping out the original wheels for a set of ET Dragmaster 5 matte black ones.

Childers would temporarily store the car at his grandparents in Panama City and after a no-start condition that would be the end of the line. He towed it to Kendrick Meyers Oldsmobile to get fixed before swapping out the gold Olds for a Pontiac GTO.

Childers was the only owner not present at the reunion, having died before they could all get together.

Mabie was a muscle car fan and as a high school student in Panama City he saw the W-31 sitting on a used car lot and knew he had to have it. The purchase required him to sell his old Impala SS and a bank loan towards the price of $1,150.

Being a car guy, he was able to identify that he had bought an original W-31, save for the set of Dragmaster wheels.

"It was (called) a sleeper back when we were young. You were always trying to get a sleeper so you didn't have to pay high insurance rates," Mabie said. (A sleeper is a car that boasts high performance while having an unassuming exterior.)

Mabie used it for street and drag racing at dragstrips across the country, from Florida to New Jersey and was the owner to give the car the most performance modifications.

"I took my sister to the hospital and my niece was nearly born in that car. We almost had an incident," Mabie shared, laughing off the memory.

Sometime in the mid 70s, the car would stop seeing regular use, sitting at Mabie's parent's house in Lynn Haven while he and his wife moved up to Marlborough, New York. That was until 1984, when he brought the car up, laying dormant in his garage until a 15-year-old bought it from him in 1988.

Finding a forever home

"I bought the car as my first car. I was 15 years old when I bought this car. I saw it in the local newspaper and I bought this car from (Mabie) with my father's help," Steve Puleo said.

"He matched every dollar I saved so that I could buy a better car than the cars I was looking at. So we paid the original selling price for this car. ... We paid $3,300, which in 1988, at the age of 15 years old, was a huge amount of money."

Over the 36 years he's had it, the gold W-31 has become part of Steve's family, traveling with him through moves, being featured in friends and family's weddings, there are even photos of Joe as a baby in the car.

He even followed in Mabie's footsteps, taking it out for races. The 55-year-old now shows off the '69 Cutlass at car shows and he's been featured in auto magazines.

He managed to renovate the car as close to the original floor model as possible which he documented on his and Joe's YouTube channel, The Auto Refinery, which is named after their car shop. On top of cleaning up the car, Steve has managed to collect all the original paperwork associated with the car, all the way back to the original document from when Leckinger bought the car.

The brothers have taken to documenting the whole journey of this reunion on their YouTube and social media pages and will have a full length video coming out soon.

Their next stop is visiting Childers' family in Panama City and heading to the childhood home of Mabie.

Arianna Otero is the City Solutions Reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. Contact her via email at AOtero@tallahassee.com or on Twitter/X: @ari_v_otero.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Three guys, one muscle car, and a reunion 55 years in the making